Good morning. We're going to
look at Romans chapter 8 today. You want to turn in your Bibles
to Romans chapter 8. This is really the second part
of last week's message, but many of you weren't here. I want to
go through this with you. There's probably nothing more
important to the believer than to understand these words from
the book of Romans. I want to, as we're doing this,
looking at Romans chapter 8, I want to take you through the
book of Romans just briefly in summary form so that you understand
it. The book of Romans is a long
book, but it's probably the most complete explanation of the gospel. It was written by the apostle
Paul, obviously, to the Romans, who were a mixture of Gentiles
and Jews. And the Gentiles and the Jews
who received this really represent us who need to receive it. Now,
let's begin here by understanding, first of all, what is the message?
Today's message is about minding the things of the spirit, minding
the things of the spirit. And I take that phrase from Romans
chapter eight. It says in verse five, they that
are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh, but they
that are after the spirit, the things of the spirit. Now we
just heard from Psalm 107, how God deals with us, how he deals
with his people. And how was that? Well, he sends
trouble. And then in that trouble, we're
left without any hope. We cry out to the Lord, and He
delivers us from that trouble. And then He shows purpose for
His deliverance is that we would understand that it was He who
saved us, so that we would praise the Lord for His goodness. Oh,
that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, for His marvelous
works to the children of men. Trouble is God's mercy. Trouble
is God's affliction, like the loving chastisement that a father
gives to his children. God chastens those he loves,
and he brings them to himself through trouble. It says in Psalm
34, the righteous cry. This is the work of God in their
hearts, to cry to the Lord for salvation. And so in the book
of Romans, what we see here is that the book begins by announcing
that the entire book is about Jesus Christ. He says in Romans
chapter one, Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be
an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God. So that's what
this book is about, it's the gospel. The gospel is good news
from heaven to sinners, good news to God's people, sinners
on earth. And that news, he says, was promised
before in the Old Testament. This is not a message that God
created in the New Testament only. He's been saying the same
thing ever since the dawn of creation. It's through the prophets,
the Holy Scriptures. And what was that message? It
is concerning His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Now, in our
lives, we naturally are absorbed with ourselves, aren't we? We
think about ourselves. We think about our lives. We
think about, do we have enough? Do we have the right comfort,
the right friends? Do I have the right job? Are
things going well for me? We're constantly thinking about
how we are doing. But the gospel takes our eyes
away from ourselves to the Lord Jesus Christ. You see, Jesus
said to know God, to know God in Jesus Christ is eternal life. We have to be taken away from
ourselves to see that our Savior is eternal life. So this opens
the book of Romans. It tells us it's concerning his
son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, which was made of the seed of
David. According to the flesh, he was born as a man. He descended
from David and through David from Abraham, but he was declared
to be the son of God. He is God in the flesh. and he
rose from the dead. But then he goes on in Romans
chapter 1, he says in verse 16, this is the Apostle Paul, I am
not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. Why is he not ashamed
of the gospel? Because the gospel, the message
of Jesus Christ is the power of God to salvation to everyone
that believes. And here's why. Verse 17, for
therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to
faith. God gives faith to us, faith
in Christ to us by telling us what Christ did. Seeing what
he did teaches us who he is. It teaches us his character.
And so this is the gospel. Now, the next part of Romans
teaches us why we need good news. When I was an engineer, we worked
with electronics. And people would create these,
what they called PC boards. They had all sorts of components
on there. You could pick up a PC board
and if you didn't know what it was used for, you'd wonder, what
is this for? It must solve some problem. But
unless you know the problem, it's worthless to you. You can't
plug it in and make it work. You don't know what it's supposed
to do. That's what a computer board looks like to us, doesn't
it? You pull it out, you go, huh, we don't need this, and
you toss it away because it's not important. You have no problem. But as soon as you realize what
it's good for, then it becomes very powerful. The gospel is
the power of God, but it means nothing to us unless we know
the problem that the gospel was given to us to address. And that's
what the next part of Romans does. In verse 18, he says, the
wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness
and unrighteousness of men. And he tells us that this describes
us. This ungodliness and unrighteousness
of men is a description of me and you. And what does this do? Well, we have been given a revelation
of who God is from birth. All men, without exception, and
we suppress it. We hold it down. We deny it.
We deny the very truth of the one who made us. Can you imagine
the arrogance? It's like a little child. They
tell their father or their mother, no, I'm telling you the truth.
No, I don't believe it. Well, that's foolish of you because
you're just a child. It's infinitely worse for us,
who are the creatures, to tell our Creator, no, I don't believe
you. Isn't it? We're calling God a
liar. We're making ourselves able to
identify, to know the truth more than God. That's arrogance. That's ignorance. It's arrogance,
it's pride. This describes us, that's the
problem. We're sinful against God. Now he goes on in chapter one
and he describes the kinds of sins that we do. It's perverse,
it's all sorts of horrible things. And then in chapter two, he addresses
those who know religion, they're religious people. And they know
what sin is because they live their life searching the Bible
to find out how they can do what God approves and how they can
avoid doing what God says not to do. They do this in order
to make themselves right before God. This is called religion.
Men are naturally very religious people. If you go outside of
these walls, you'll find there's people called Catholics, and
Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses, and Baptists, and Pentecostals,
and Church of Christ, and Methodists, and Reformed, and all sorts of
different denominations. Why so many? They all teach basically
the same thing. And what is that? That what we
do makes a difference with God and that God respects what we
do and he rewards us, he approves of us, he accepts us, and he
gives us life. And how do they get that information?
Well, because God did something in order to excite this sinfulness
in men and to show the badness of their sin when he gave his
own law to us. When God gave his law to us,
it says, now you shall not lie, you shall not steal, you shall
not kill, and don't be lusting, don't be desiring what that other
person has. That's called covetousness. And
so what do we do? Well, we lie, we steal, we take
what's not ours, and we hate, we murder in our hearts. We do
everything God said not to do. We prove ourselves to be sinful. And so we show that God's law
reveals how ugly we really are, and how bad we really are, and
truly how helpless we are. Now these sins, the things that
we do wrong, they prove what we are, and that is the big problem. You see, that's what God is trying
to show by giving us his own commandments, is that we're sinners. and we do bad things, and the
bad things we do are awful, but it's not so much how bad of things
that we do that's the problem. The problem is us. The great
enemy that we have is our own sinful selves. Our pride, for
example, or this desire to have stuff, this constant focus on
ourselves, this selfishness. This describes us. All of us
are like this by nature. And it's called our sinful nature,
a carnal mind. We don't like God. We put away
the truth he has shown us. We fight against it. We deny
that we're wrong. We try to hold a courtroom. We try to assess how we're doing. And we find that we're doing
pretty good because we keep some rules or we're not as bad as
other people. And this is what a religious
attitude does. And so that we're able to judge
others, but we can't truly judge ourselves. And so we continue
to use these rules in order to set ourselves right and think
that we're doing okay. And sometimes we mess up so bad
that we become depressed. and we want to escape life. And
this attitude of depression is just another way of our pride
coming out because we always thought that we could set things
right and we failed and we don't know what to do because we failed
and we can't fix the problem. You see, we always trust ourselves
to get things right. And that is the big sin. Independence of God. This attitude
of depending on ourselves to make ourselves what God requires. And thinking we can do it. When
God has given us His law to hold us as if in a jail, to bring
us to the bottom in order to show us there's only one who
can fix us, the one who made us. The one who made us must
save us. And so that's the first part
of Romans. Now, he tells us this after beating us up in Romans
chapter one and chapter two. In the first part of chapter
three, he says, there's none good, no, not one. But notice
these words in chapter three. Listen carefully. Now you've
been beat up, like we saw in Psalm 107. God sends a storm. The ship is on the sea. The waves
arise. The mariners, those on the ship,
are terrified they're going to drown. What do they do? God,
save us! And the Lord sends a calm. And
then he says, oh, that men would praise the Lord for His goodness.
And here is the calm. Here is the solution. Here's
the answer. Notice Romans chapter three and
verse 24, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption
that is in Christ Jesus. Yes, we're sinners. And we're
helplessly sinners. We're so bad, we can't fix ourselves. In Jeremiah 13, 23, it says,
Can the Ethiopian change his skin? Can a leopard change his
spots? No, no. Then, you who are accustomed
to doing evil cannot do good. Now isn't that plain? And yet
we try to break out, I'm gonna remove the shameful things that
people look at about me that are bad and I'm gonna fix it.
I'm gonna make myself acceptable in the eyes of people and in
my own conscience and somehow God's gonna look at the good
things I do and he's gonna say, you're okay. He's not. No, the
message here is that you're hopelessly, helplessly wicked. In the eyes
of God, you are nothing but guilty and you're worthy of God's judgment. And now he says here, listen,
being justified freely by his grace through the redemption
that is in Christ Jesus, God sets, he's the judge, and the
judge here says, He will declare us to be perfectly righteous,
having no sin, having done all things right, according to His
grace, freely, because of the work of the Lord Jesus Christ,
to bear the sins of His people, to fulfill the law they could
never keep. That's called the righteousness
of God, the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. God set him
forth to be the propitiation for our sins, to take away his
wrath, to satisfy his justice, to make up for our sins, and
to fulfill all that his law requires. That's the good news. Now, that's
declared to us. That's the gospel. Now, what
are you going to do? Well, our natural, when we first
hear that, what happens? What happens to us when we first
hear those words? Well, if we've been brought down,
like in Psalm 107, to the depths, and we have no way out, and we're
helpless and hopeless, and God shines the light and says, do
you see what the Lord Jesus Christ has done? His redeeming grace? His work to take away our sins
and to fulfill God's law and to do it so much that He did
it so that God rewards us with eternal life because He treats
us as Him. All that He did, He did for us.
And we say, how could this be? How could God be so gracious
to me, the sinner? And we're amazed beyond measure. We don't know how to describe
our amazement with words. It's too good of news to comprehend. We can't believe it. It's just
too good. And then the Lord says this.
He says that you come now. You come into my presence by
the blood of Jesus. only. That's it. And that's enough. You as a sinner, you come to
me through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And coming by Him,
God looks upon Him for you. And you are received because
God sees Him for you and sees you in Him. Now this coming to
God is the result of God obviously working in our lives, bringing
us to see that what Christ did is all of our justification,
everything God requires of us, has been met in His Son. That's
the gospel. And so he goes on in chapter
4 of Romans. What shall we say then that Abraham
our father is pertaining to the flesh hath found? Abraham was
a man like us, but he was a great man. God blessed him. God gave
him children. He promised him to inherit the
whole world. Did Abraham get those things
by doing something in his flesh? No, he says, absolutely not. In verse five, he says, to him
that does not work, but believes on him that justifies the ungodly,
his faith is counted for righteousness. When God does the work, we simply
stand still and say, the Lord did it. Look what he did. That's
what happened to Abraham. God said, Abraham, you're gonna
have a son. And through your son, the Lord
Jesus Christ is going to come and he's going to justify his
people. And Abraham said, Wow, he was
fully persuaded that what God promised he was going to do,
and he depended on it. And then he got older and older
until he was 100 years old, until he actually had the baby God
promised. And so he learned through that
that he could do nothing to bring about what God promised. God
had to do the whole thing, and he did it. And the thing that
he did was bring his son into the world through Abraham when
he was dead to having children. And God says at the end of chapter
four, Christ was delivered for our offenses, he was raised again
for our justification. God looks upon us and he says,
no sin. He looks upon us, he says, perfectly
obedient, absolutely righteous. They receive everlasting life
because their righteousness is in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you can get a hold of that,
as one of these drowning mariners on the sea of your own depravity
and your corruption and your guilt before God, having no hope,
if you can see that God has provided and looks upon the Lord Jesus
Christ for you, so that you depend upon Him and rejoice in Him.
Then God says, you are justified by his blood. And then chapter
five, he goes on. So it's not our flesh, Romans
chapter four. Abraham discovered he did not
consider his own body. It was dead to having children.
So God brought Christ to life after having laid our offenses
on him and justified us by his work. Chapter five, Romans chapter
five, notice this. It says in verse five, of chapter
five, our hope does not leave us ashamed, does not make us
ashamed because the love of God, notice, the love of God. is shed abroad, it means it's
poured out, it's communicated to us in an abundant manner so
that it permeates, it goes in between all of the crevices and
the parts of our being. The love of God in Christ is
shed abroad in our hearts, it's poured out upon us by the Holy
Spirit of God. This is very important. The title
of the message is Minding the Things of the Spirit. What does
the Spirit of God do according to this verse? He sheds abroad,
he pours out, he communicates an abundance of God's love. How
does he do it? Look at verse six. This is how
the Spirit of God, which we received graciously, Because of God's
grace, because of Christ's righteousness, this is what God's Spirit in
us does when He teaches us and convinces us of the love of God. He does it by directing us to
the Lord Jesus Christ and what God did when we were sinners. He shows us what God did by Christ,
what Christ did out of His love when we were sinners. And it's necessary for us to
be directed to this all of the time. Because God has to do the
work. He has to do the saving. And
He did it when we were sinners. What's the conclusion? If He
did this for us when we were ungodly and sinners and enemies,
then how will we be saved in the end? In the same way. Notice, I'll read it. When we
were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the
ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous
man will one die, yet peradventure for a good man some would even
dare to die. But God commendeth he made known
his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died
for us, much more than, listen, being now justified by his blood. Do you see there's no part of
you in that? Justified by his blood. Your sins washed from
you because they were put on the Lord Jesus Christ and he
fulfilled that righteousness to put them away. being now justified
by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if
when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death
of his son, much more." Notice, being reconciled, we shall be
saved how? By our striving by our getting
into the closet with our knives and guns and shooting our sinful
selves until we're dead? No, we will be saved by His life. If Christ, by dying, justified
us, if he brought us to God by his own death, then how much
more, now that he's risen and seated at the right hand of God,
will he, in his victory, in his power, in his majesty, save us
to the uttermost? That's the argument here, you
see. Now what does this cause us to do? These mariners on the
storms of the corruption of our nature, what does it cause us
to do? It ought to cause us to do the opposite of what we did
when we didn't know God, which was to suppress all knowledge
of Him. It causes us now to embrace Him, to look upon the Lord Jesus
Christ in all of His perfections and admire and adore Him. and
to go to him and trust him to do what we cannot do, which is
to deliver us from our sins. And so he says this at the end
of chapter 5, as sin reigned unto death, even so might grace
reign like a king through righteousness, the righteousness of Christ unto
eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. You see, it's all about
Him. We have to know Him. We have to see Him. We have to
come to Him. We have to trust Him. We have
to lay it all on Him. And God causes us to do that
when we have no strength. He gives us the grace of faith.
When we hear this is God's message, this is God's will, He directs
us to Him and brings us in our hearts to trust in Him. Now,
in chapter 6, because some would say, well, if sin abounds when
the law enters, then what are we going to do if grace comes? Are we going to just sin in every
way that we can possibly think of now? We're going to let grace
abound more because it abounded when we were sinners when the
law entered? Are we going to now make grace
abound by sinning more? No. That's what it means in verse
2. No, God forbid. Notice this. How shall we that
are dead to sin live any longer therein? Now, in this chapter,
the Lord Jesus Christ, notice this, this is incredibly important. What were we because of our sins? We were condemned to death, weren't
we? We were under the judgment of God. What did God do when
we ourselves were utterly sinful? What did he do? Well, he put
to death what was the cause of our eternal death. He bore, the
Lord Jesus Christ bore our sins as a body in His own body, and
in the death of His body, He put the body of our sins to death.
This is amazing. And if you get sick and you get
cancer, all the cells of your body are disrupted, or lots of
them are. and you cannot find a surgeon
who can go in and divide between those cells that are corrupted
by cancer and take the cancer out of each cell, can you? You
know what they do? They give you poison, they kill
them all. But God was able to divide his
people. He was able to take their sins
as a body and put them on the Lord Jesus Christ. And then he
bore them as his own and suffered the punishment for them and died
the death with those sins so that the body of our sins died
in his death and was buried. But then, having died with our
body of sins, and our body of sins having died with him, what
happened? He rose from the dead without
sin. Our body of sins was left in the grave. We rose with Christ. What he's saying here is that
God took the mass of our sins, all of our corruptions and sins,
and placed them on the Lord Jesus Christ and put them to death.
God condemned what condemned us. God put to death what separated
us from Him. And that's what He's saying in
Romans 6. Should we sin now that grace
may abound? Of course not. God put our sins to death. So
how then can we have any victory over these sins? Look at verse
14. Sin shall not have dominion over
you. Why? Because you are able by
your resolve and strength of character to stop sinning? No. Here's why. Because you're
not under the law, but you're under grace. You see, sin doesn't
have control, doesn't have dominion over us because we're under the
grace of God. By the redeeming work of Christ,
our sins have died, our body of sins have died, and notice
what he says in verse 17. Here's the evidence of that freedom. from that condemning sins that
we are. He says, God be thanked. You
were the servants of sin, but notice what you've done. You
have obeyed from the heart, what? That form of doctrine which was
delivered to you. And what was that? Back in chapter
five, Christ died for our sins. Chapter three, being justified
freely by his grace. You see, when we were under the
law, we went about to try to please God by doing everything
we thought God required of us, because that's what the law says.
You have to do this, or you die. And if you do that, you die. If you want to live, you have
to do these things, and all of them. And we, in our blind pride,
thought, yeah, we can. But no, we didn't realize we
were so bad. We were so part of, sin was so
much part of us that we were the sin problem. But God, in
his grace, he not only said, I'm gonna put all of the responsibility
on the Lord Jesus Christ so that what he does, you will do with
him and in him. And what he did in his obedience,
you will be doing that. God would count Christ as us
and us in him. He would join us to him so that
these two things couldn't be separated. So that as Adam sinned
and we sinned in Adam, so when Christ obeyed, we obeyed in him.
He becomes our righteousness. So here he's saying that when
we heard that in verse 17 of chapter six, we heard it and
what did we do? We believed it. How did that
happen? God did it. God be thanked. You
were utterly blind to the goodness of the gospel, blind to your
own pride and lust, thinking that you could somehow figure
it out, you could intellectually sort things out. No, you were
wrong. You need to take your eyes off
of your own self as any part of the solution and see that
God has already solved the problem in the great computer board,
which is the Lord Jesus Christ and his redeeming work. You didn't
even know it was a problem until God drove you to it by his law,
showing you that when the law entered, your sin grew and grew
and grew until you were buried by it. And God did this. Now he says, in the same way,
when you first heard the gospel of his grace, what was it? That
Christ had done it all. And God received you for what
the Lord Jesus Christ had done. And that he did it all by his
grace, in spite of your sin, in spite of your utter weakness.
And in chapter six, he says, in fact, it was so much done
by him that when he died, your sin body died with him. And having
been put to death with him and having had righteousness established
by him, what did God do? He gave you this grace, this
grace of life by his spirit to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
That was the obedience of faith. Now in chapter seven, what happens
is, We go back to, well, what about the law then? Is the law
bad? Since God gave us the law, it
made sin appear worse than it really was? Or no, it made it
appear in its proper light really bad. What does God do now? He tells us that the law itself
is not bad, but the problem was the law was never designed to
save. The law can't make us obey. The
law can only condemn us when we disobey. So something had
to happen. We had to be, that relationship
we had to God's law had to be broken in a way that was right,
that the law itself would agree with. And that's what Romans
7 says. He says that in ordinary life,
people get married. And they're always married until
one of them dies. So he says here in Romans 7 that
we were joined to the law, the law was like our husband, but
God broke that contract, that covenant between us and the law
through the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. Because when Christ
came, he was under the law and died under the curse of the law,
but he fulfilled his righteousness in his death, our relationship
to the law died. The law has nothing to say to
the Lord Jesus Christ. God's law has nothing to say
to him because he fulfilled it all. He suffered its death. And
therefore, when he died, he not only died for us, but we died
with him to the law. And our relationship to the law
was broken. Now, it wasn't just broken so that we could be a
free electron unbound to something, so that we would be neutral. No, he says in chapter 7, he
says, In verse six, we are delivered
from the law, that being dead wherein we were held, that contract,
that covenant, that body of sins was put to death, therefore we're
dead to it, in order that we should serve in newness of spirit. Okay, newness of spirit. Now
we're believers. How do we become believers? God
gave us grace by his spirit. He sent his spirit into our hearts.
He caused us to believe Him. He pointed us to Christ. The
love of God was shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit
that was given to us. Now that He did that in the beginning,
what does He do in order for us to live? The same thing. You see, Little children have
to learn to obey. And this lesson comes home to
me whenever I'm around young children again, like I have been
this weekend. And they can't understand the
reasons why they need to obey. They just need to learn because
it's right. Dad or mom said so, and you got
to learn to do that. And they find that frustrating.
They want to be free. They want to think on their own.
They want to make decisions and stuff, but they're not wise enough
to make the right decisions. So mom and dad keep them under
this strict rule of just do this because I said so. And God says
that that's exactly what he did to us. This is what he does to
his people. He says that the law was like
a schoolmaster to us. And the schoolmaster's job was
to make sure that the children that were put under his care
obeyed, regardless of whether they wanted to or not. And he
had a little stick and he would make them obey. And they hated
it, but they were treated just like slaves. Just do it. and
they would get corrected, and they'd get used to it, and they
were humbled by it. They realized that they were nothing more than
servants under this law, but they were always frustrated by
it, and the law actually served to show them that they were naturally
rebellious. And then in time, after a long
course of time, God sent his son into the world. And his son
was made under the law. And he was born as a man made
under the law in order that he might redeem us from the curse
and the bondage of the law. And having done that, then God
sent his spirit into our hearts because we were his children
and he gave us his spirit to confess that Jesus Christ is
all. That's what it says in Galatians
chapter 4. He sent forth his spirit into
our hearts and what do we cry? Abba, Father. Now we don't know
God as the, we don't know the schoolmaster, now we know the
Father. At the appointed time, our heavenly
Father, just like in history, He released us from that school
master by showing us Christ. Christ came into the world and
fulfilled the law. And that's what happens. And
in Romans 7, what we find is that the believer is under the
sense of the law, and when they are, sin gets worse. Their sin
nature appears really bad, and they can't do anything about
it. And we live in this attitude, well, I have to obey all these
rules, but we can't obey them. We can't keep it, we can't make
God happy by what we do. We can't make ourselves better
by what we do. We find that the harder we try,
the worse we seem to get. What's the answer? Well, all
of this is intended to teach us two lessons, as I mentioned
last week. The first one is that we are
in ourselves nothing but sin. We are, as the apostle Paul says
in verse 24, Romans 7, oh, wretched man that I am. Who shall deliver
me from the body of this death? See, God has to bring us to that,
like the Psalm 107. Who's gonna save me from the
storm? We cry out, oh, wretched, sinful man that I am, who shall
deliver me from the body of this death? And then this is the second
lesson. I thank God through Jesus Christ,
our Lord. That's it. The strength doesn't
come from me. It comes from outside of me.
It comes from Jesus Christ, our Lord, because he delivered us
from sin. He reigns. He will deliver us
by his life. And then Romans 8 now comes to
us with all of the weight of Romans 7. We're under this sense
of our own corruption and sinfulness. We realize that we can only be
saved by Christ. And the Lord says, now in your
life, As you struggle here, looking to Christ, because that's what
the Spirit of God does. He sheds abroad the love of God
in our hearts by teaching us what Christ has done for us.
He says, there is therefore now no condemnation to them which
are in Christ Jesus. Notice, who walk not after the
flesh. In other words, we don't live
by the principle of what we must do to make God happy or to make
ourselves better. We don't pick up the scriptures
and search and try to find out what we need to do in order to
have eternal life or to set things right. What do we do? We find
out the scriptures tell us about Jesus and that our salvation
is in him. There's no condemnation to them
which are in Christ Jesus who live by the spirit of God. And what is His work? It's to
shed abroad the love of God in our hearts to teach us what Christ
has done. He says in verse two, the law of the spirit of life,
that's the gospel. That law in Christ Jesus has
the strength of a law. The gospel has made us free from
the law of sin and death. For what the law, God's law in
the Old Testament could not do in that it was weak because of
our sinful flesh. God did by sending his own son
in the likeness of sinful flesh and for our sin, condemned sin
in the flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ. And He condemned sin
in our flesh too when He did that. In order that, verse 4,
the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who
walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. How do we live
our lives? depending on Christ. Do we depend on ourselves? No.
And when we do that, what does it prove? That we've been given
life from God. That's the righteousness of the
law being fulfilled in us. Life has been given to us, and
the evidence of that life is that we trust Christ for everything.
In verse 5, they that are after the flesh, who live by their
own carnal reasoning, depending upon the law to do what God requires,
They that are after the flesh mind the things of the flesh.
They're constantly thinking, what can I not do? What do I have to do? Dot, dot,
dot. I got to cross all these T's
and dot all these I's, make things right. But they that are after
the spirit, the things of the spirit, the child of God is taught,
you look to Christ. There's only salvation in him.
He had to do the work to save you in the beginning. He has
to do the work now. You are a sinner, and you can't
deliver yourself. And so it goes on in Romans 8,
talking about our relationship to God the Father because of
Christ. By his spirit in us crying out,
oh, my father. And even when we don't know what
to pray, the spirit of God intercedes for us with groanings that cannot
be uttered. And we discover that God predestinated
us to be conformed to the image of his son, and he's going to
do that. And he's going to do it through all things in our
life, And we're gonna learn that if God is for us, no one can
be against us. And he's going to finish the
work because nothing can separate us from the love of God, which
is in Christ Jesus. You see how it all ties together?
In Galatians 3, the apostle tells the Galatians, you foolish Galatians,
who has bewitched you? Are you under a spell? You began
in the spirit. Did you do that by the works
of the flesh or by the hearing of faith? If you began by the
hearing of faith, why do you think you're made perfect by
the law, by the flesh? You see, it's being mindful of
the things of the spirit. The spirit of God, it says in
Revelation 19.10 that the spirit of prophecy, Jesus is the spirit
of prophecy. That's what he talks about, our
Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Is there any better than him,
any greater? No. Let's pray. Father, We pray
that you would save us as these mariners and these people in
Psalm 107. We cannot deliver ourselves.
We're not even aware of our need to be saved and to be delivered
until you bring us into trouble we can't get out of. And we know
that the great trouble we need to be brought into is the awareness
of our sinfulness and our helplessness in our sin. And we pray, Lord,
that you would deliver us from that. We know that we can't do
it. We can't get ourselves out. But
we understand that the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us and now
reigns in heaven, can and will do that. He will deliver us.
I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Help us to be ever
mindful of the things of the Spirit of Christ. that we would
see him as the testimony of God in all of the Bible, and we would
live upon him by faith. Give us this faith, Lord, cause
us to trust him, and help us to do what you said in Psalm
107, oh, that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, for
his marvelous works to the children of men. Thank you for your goodness
and your mercy in Christ, in Jesus' name we pray, amen.